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This technical report explores how network energy saving technologies that have emerged since the 4G era, such as carrier shutdown, channel shutdown, symbol shutdown etc., can be leveraged to mitigate 5G energy consumption.
“A 5G base station is generally expected to consume roughly three times as much power as a 4G base station. And more 5G base stations are needed to cover the same area,” -IEEE Spectrum, 5G's Waveform Is a Battery Vampire
A report from GSMA about 5G network cost suggests up to 140% more energy consumption than 4G . Energy saving measures in MNOs are needs rather than nice-to-have. What is more important is that sustainability has risen to the top of the agenda for many industries, including telecoms.
It also analyses how enhanced technologies like deep sleep, symbol aggregation shutdown etc., have been developing in the 5G era. This report aims to detail these fundamentals. However, it is far away from being enough, a revolutionized energy saving solution should be taken into consideration.
The photovoltaic storage system is introduced into the ultra-dense heterogeneous network of 5G base stations composed of macro and micro base stations to form the micro network structure of 5G base stations .
Because it is estimated that in 5G, the base station's density is expected to exceed 40–50 BSs/ Km 2 . The energy consumption of the 5G network is driving attention and many world-leading network operators have launched alerts about the increased power consumption of the 5G mobile infrastructure .
Therefore, 5G macro and micro base stations use intelligent photovoltaic storage systems to form a source-load-storage integrated microgrid, which is an effective solution to the energy consumption problem of 5G base stations and promotes energy transformation.
Access to the 5G base station microgrid photovoltaic storage system based on the energy sharing strategy has a significant effect on improving the utilization rate of the photovoltaics and improving the local digestion of photovoltaic power. The case study presented in this paper was considered the base stations belonging to the same operator.